Universal Display Corporation is a world leader in the development of innovative OLED technology for use in flat panel displays, lighting and organic electronics. Since our founding in 1994, our mission has been to provide these innovations to OLED manufacturers for their use in commercializing new generations of OLED products. To do so, our business strategy consists of these key elements: Technology Licensing; UniversalPHOLED® Materials Sales; Technology Development and Technology Transfer Services. [Universal Display Corporation Website, About]

LED light bulbs, with their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, have grabbed the consumer's imagination.

But an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes, create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colors, just like their inorganic LED cousins. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible.

Ingo Maurer, who has designed chandeliers of shattered plates and light bulbs with bird wings, is using 10 OLED panels in a table lamp in the shape of a tree. The first of its kind, it sells for about $10,000.

He is thinking of other uses. “If you make a wall divider with OLED panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he said.

Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds, so that after dusk a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.

Today, OLEDs are used in a few cellphones, like the Impression from Samsung, and for small, expensive, ultrathin TVs from Sony and soon from LG. (Sony’s only OLED television, with an 11-inch screen, costs $2,500.) OLED displays produce a high-resolution picture with wider viewing angles than LCD screens.

In 2008, seven million of the one billion cellphones sold worldwide used OLED screens, according to Jennifer Colegrove, a DisplaySearch analyst. She predicts that next year, that number will jump more than sevenfold, to 50 million phones.

But OLED lighting may be the most promising market. Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first OLED sheets that one day will illuminate large residential and commercial spaces. Eventually they will be as energy efficient and long-lasting as LED bulbs, they say.

Because of the diffuse, even light that OLEDs emit, they will supplement, rather than replace, other energy-efficient technologies, like LED, compact fluorescent and advanced incandescent bulbs that create light from a single small point.

Its use may be limited at first, designers say, and not just because of its high price. “OLED lighting is even and monotonous,” said Mr. Maurer, a lighting designer with studios in Munich and New York. “It has no drama; it misses the spiritual side.”

“OLED lighting is almost unreal,” said Hannes Koch, a founder of rAndom International in London, a product design firm. “It will change the quality of light in public and private spaces.”

Mr. Koch’s firm was recently commissioned by Philips to create a prototype wall of OLED light, whose sections light up in response to movement.

Because OLED panels could be flexible, lighting companies are imagining sheets of lighting material wrapped around columns. (General Electric created an OLED-wrapped Christmas tree as an experiment.) OLED can also be incorporated into glass windows; nearly transparent when the light is off, the glass would become opaque when illuminated.

Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and give off virtually no heat when lighted, one day architects will no longer need to leave space in ceilings for deep lighting fixtures, just as homeowners do not need a deep armoire for their television now that flat-panel TVs are common.

The new technology is being developed by major lighting companies like G.E., Konica Minolta, Osram Sylvania, Philips and Universal Display.

“We’re putting significant financial resources into OLED development,” said Dieter Bertram, general manager for Philips’s OLED lighting group. Philips recently stepped up its investment in this area with the world’s first production line for OLED lighting, in Aachen, Germany.

Universal Display, a company started 15 years ago that develops and licenses OLED technologies, has received about $10 million in government grants over the last five years for OLED development, said Joel Chaddock, a technical project manager for solid state lighting in the Energy Department.

Armstrong World Industries and the Energy Department collaborated with Universal Display to develop thin ceiling tiles that are cool to the touch while producing pleasing white light that can be dimmed like standard incandescent bulbs. With a recently awarded $1.65 million government contract, Universal is now creating sheetlike undercabinet lights.

“The government’s role is to keep the focus on energy efficiency,” Mr. Chaddock said. “Without government input, people would settle for the neater aspects of the technology.”

G.E. is developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, similar to the way photo film and food packaging are created; it expects to offer OLED lighting sheets as early as the end of next year.

“We think that a flexible product is the way to go,” said Anil Duggal, head of G.E.’s 30-person OLED development team. OLED is one of G.E.’s top research priorities; the company is spending more than half its research and development budget for lighting on OLED.

Exploiting the flexible nature of OLED technology, Universal Display has developed prototype displays for the United States military, including a pen with a built-in screen that can roll in and out of the barrel.

The company has also supplied the Air Force with a flexible, wearable tablet that includes GPS technology and video conferencing capabilities.

As production increases and the price inevitably drops, OLED will eventually find wider use, its proponents believe, in cars, homes and businesses.

“I want to get the price down to $6 for an OLED device that gives off the same amount of light as a standard 60-watt bulb,” said Mr. Duggal of G.E. “Then, we’ll be competitive.”

IMAGINE a windowpane that makes its own light. By day, the glass is transparent, but once the sun sets, it becomes a luminescent panel to brighten your home.

Janice Mahon can envision this and more. She pictures a light source imprinted on thin sheets of plastic that can be mounted on the ceiling like wallpaper. Unroll it, paste it overhead and - presto! - you have a room that glows.

For a portable light source, she foresees a luminous sheet, just a millimeter or two thick, coiled in the tube of a pen and ready to be unfurled for use as a flashlight. She can imagine hundreds of other applications: furniture, appliances and clothing, all embedded with thin glowing panels.

Ms. Mahon, working here in Mercer County north of Trenton, hasn't been watching too much ''Star Trek.'' As the vice president for technology commercialization at the Universal Display Corporation in Ewing, she knows the science behind the gadgetry. She and her company are following in the footsteps of that New Jersey inventor Thomas A. Edison, who pioneered the science of light with the creation of the incandescent lamp.

Universal Display, which reported revenue of $2.4 million last year, began in 1994 as a developer of organic light-emitting diode technologies for use in flat-panel displays, like laptop computers. The company started with five employees and now has 45. It derives its income from government grants (its largest so far were $3 million and $2 million for military technology projects), technology development programs with other companies like Sony, Samsung and Toyota and chemical sales.

Universal Display has since broadened its focus to include white lighting, or general functional lighting like that now used in offices and households. It sees a future lighted by a new technology of phosphorescent organic light-emitting devices, or pholeds (pronounced FO-leds). Last month it received $950,000 in grants from the United States Department of Energy to develop them.

Unlike filament light bulbs, pholed technology will offer lighting in thin flat sheets. Each sheet is made of stacked organic films that generate light when stimulated by an electric current.

''It's kind of like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,'' Ms. Mahon said, describing the layered design. ''It will mean we can carry light around in a whole different way.''

Universal Display estimates that pholed lighting technology will be available to consumers in five to 10 years, initially in the form of glass panels. Next will come the ''wallpaper'': thin sheets of plastic covered in pholeds. To make the sheets, light-emitting molecules will be printed on films of plastic. The company says that these sheets of light will someday cost little more than the plastic they are printed on.

Ten years may seem like a long time to wait, but Universal Display expects pholed technology to be used in specialty lighting and custom architectural applications much sooner, perhaps within three to five years. Architects are already approaching the company with ideas.

''We hear all kinds of wild things,'' Ms. Mahon said. One architect, she said, wants to build a room in which supporting pillars are wrapped in flexible white pholed sheets, making them into cylinders of light.

The most compelling aspect of pholed technology, however, goes beyond the gee-whiz factor. Behind the magic wallpaper is an environmentalist's dream: generate light without creating wasteful heat.

The incandescent light bulb is a glutton for energy, transforming nearly 95 percent of its electricity input to heat. Pholeds have the potential to convert nearly 100 percent of their electricity input into light output.

Steve Forrest, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton University who is working with Universal Display to develop pholed technology, has big expectations.

''About 80 percent of the lighting out there is incandescent,'' he said, referring to lighting use worldwide. ''If we can do a little bit better, we can make a big impact. But we can do a lot better, I'm sure.''

Efficient lighting technology is interesting to a wide swath of people, and not all of them wear lab coats. Homeowners know that less energy consumption means lower electric bills and perhaps no more power blackouts of the type that shut down the Northeast last summer. Environmentalists have long championed the cause of conservation. And politicians know that reducing the national electricity tab will lower American dependence on foreign oil.

''What we have right now is shamefully wasteful,'' said Nitin Pandit, executive director of the International Institute of Energy Conservation. ''The potential for improving lighting in the U.S. and abroad is absolutely gargantuan.''

But with acres of lamps and miles of track lighting already in place, are Americans ready to embrace a future in which light doesn't come in boxes of bulbs, but on sheets of plastic?

''Give the good engineers a chance and they'll find a neat way of using it,'' Mr. Pandit mused. ''I can imagine a wall in my house that would look rather nice with that.''